Back in October, 2016 I wrote an essay called Sexual Zoning. In that post I explored the social inconsistencies and potential for (sometimes catastrophic) consequences for men in misunderstanding what were, and what have become, particular zones in which men and women covertly acknowledge the potential for an intersexual connection.
In the bygone Western social system, young people were expected to regularly interact with one another in controlled, regulated environments, in a way that fostered productive, long-term, monogamous, assortative relationships. This was a sort of “holistic” milieu, so to speak, where young people treated one another as potential future partners, sexual and otherwise, in a socially regulated manner, in all cases when they were permitted to interact. This was even the norm in workplaces where both men and women were present. The average man found a girlfriend through his extended family or social circle, because families and social circles were normally large.
What we have today is the complete opposite: “sexual zoning”. Some mixed-sex environments, like the workplace, schools and campuses, are made completely asexual – sterile, so to speak. No sexualized interactions are permitted to take place. This is demanded by law and expected by society. In such environments, you’re supposed to treat members of the opposite sex strictly as colleagues or professionals, non-sexual beings. (Hot men are allowed to get away with more, of course, but that’s another issue.) Other mixed-sex environments, on the other hand, like nightclubs, are expected to be full-on sexual. Everybody there knows that all interactions entail the future possibility of casual sex. It’s basically a meat market. You’re expected to hit on girls, and girls expect to be hit on by attractive men. Socializing in these environments requires action, engagement. If you want to find a partner, either just for sex or something more, you have to go there, you have to have Game etc.
The video I’ve chosen to dissect here is a prime example of how generations of men have been raised to deliberately misunderstand intersexual dynamics and at the same time demonize the conventional masculinity that so much of western culture has been founded upon. To be thorough though, really every culture throughout history has been primarily founded on conventional masculinity and the aspects that contribute to maleness.
Jonathan McIntosh finds an easy mark in the archetypal masculine characters of Harrison Ford, but there’s a very important reason the 80’s icon is so egregious to the men of McIntosh’s generation. Han Solo, Indiana Jones, etc. are all the Alpha male rogues this generation has been taught to love in terms of bravado, but to hate because they ‘always get the girl’; and they get her in such a way that it grates against all that their feminine-primary upbringing led them to believe was just this side of sexual assault.
McIntosh relates that he was part of a generation that idealized Harrison Ford’s most iconic characters, yet now he feels pangs of regret and resentment for having looked up the characters’ archetype. This is a perfect illustration of how conventional masculinity has been reverse engineered by our feminine-primary social order since the Sexual Revolution. I’ve mentioned in many prior essays that while overt masculinity is vilified as the cause of all social evils, it still remains the most arousing aspect of men for women. Boys like McIntosh saw this archetype and made that connection to female attraction, but it took generations of Blue Pill reconditioning to make them feel bad for ever attempting to adopt that bravado into their own personalities.
While growing up the message was the same Blue Pill identifying with the feminine (in fact Beta Game depends on that identification). Play nice, play equal, respect all women by default and never assert yourself too overtly or too crudely lest you risk offending her sensibilities. These are the boys who were raised by family, media and their schooling to expect a rationality that women could be expected to say what they mean and then do what they said. Yet that never seemed to gel when they would deductively see the girls they wanted, the ones who told them they wanted a ‘nice guy’ who respected them, consistently reward the asshole jerk with the intimacy and sex they thought would come to them if they followed what they were told.
In the end, Han Solo and Indiana Jones get the girl and she genuinely desires him – not because this is some odd fantasy of the writer’s imagination, but because this is (was) a standard aspect of women’s genuine attraction to men. The aberration is the idea that the attraction and affair would go any other way. Only in this feminized generation does thousands of years of male-female interaction seem at all unsettling.
So, here we have conventionally masculine archetypes – sometimes rakish, sometimes bold and dutiful – following their own path, making themselves their Mental Point of Origin, and making their mission (not their woman) their priority. Whether it was Captain Kirk, Han Solo or Conan the Barbarian the mental order was always firmly focused on the individual man and his action. Between the time of the Sexual Revolution and 2017, the Feminine Imperative has systematically erased the conventionally masculine archetype; so much so that the gender-loathing men of this generation are either appalled at displays of masculinity or they simply have no frame of reference with which to contrast it with the distorted and blurred ideas of what masculinity should mean to them.
For some ‘men’ the notion of conventional masculinity itself is rejected altogether. It doesn’t mean anything to be a man for this generation, so conventional archetypes of men are offensive.
As a result of these four to five generations of progressively more feminized men we now see the confusion and disgust at conventional masculinity coming from this generation of men. We see a generation of males who have no positive association with their own gender. They become increasingly more isolated because they are convinced that anything that might be gender-exclusive to men alone is, by default, a form of misogyny. There is nothing ‘positive’ about being a man, yet for all of the misconceptions about gender being social constructs, exclusively female organizing of women and fempowerment is still viewed as beneficial; a sign of society ‘evolving’.
I recently read an article in the Boston Globe about middle aged men’s increasing social isolation. I would argue that for all of the raising of awareness about this phenomenon it is primarily generations of men’s inability to interact with other men that is at the root of this isolation. For decades now men have been discouraged from meeting with other men in any formalized fashion. Men are either suspect of misogyny or homosexuality if they get together for the sake of being men. What were seeing now is generations of men who no longer understand how to socially interact with other men.
Furthermore, when this isolation becomes a concern of women, those men are again berated for not interacting with other men in the ways that women do. Women talk, men do, but a feminine-primary social order only approves of one way for men to associate with one another – in the way that women do. Thus, we see the confusion of women that men don’t call each other up to schedule a coffee date for the express reason of conversation. Men and women have different forms of communication, but the socially approved form is only ever from the feminine context. Men interacting “as men do” – in a conventionally masculine way – is always misogynistic. Thus, we see overseers in the locker room, if only symbolically, to regulate what and how men communicate with each other.
The End of Toxic Masculinity
Dalrock had a great quick-hit post recently about how Michael Moore was suggesting that men be required by law to seek their wife or long-term girlfriend’s (or most recent Ex) signed permission to purchase a firearm in the wake of last week’s mass shooting in Vegas.
That this idea would ever be a serious consideration speaks volumes about how masculine gender-loathing has become endemic in western culture. I get that Michael Moore is a self-inflicted cuck, but all I’m seeing in the wake of the Vegas shooting is less about gun control and more about male control.
It’s no longer about categorizing masculinity as “toxic” or “hyper” – that narrative is officially dropped after this shooting. Now, any masculinity is a threat, any expression of conventional masculinity is the true problem. Suggesting that a woman’s oversight and discernment should be necessary for a man to have access to a civil right only further reinforces what I’ve been saying for some time now – only the feminine is ‘correct’ in any social discourse. Only the feminine is legitimate in exercising judgement, educating new generations and deciding which man will breed and which will not.
Think about this; what’s being suggested is that men be denied a civil right that apparently only women should legitimately have. For all the fallacious blathering of women in pink pussy hats about how they think they’re losing rights today, here we have an actual right of men being denied by women, by the Feminine Imperative.
The ‘toxic’ masculinity narrative made a qualitative distinction between a feminine-acceptable form of masculinity and a potentially dangerous form. Needless to say the accepted form always consisted of whatever aspects of masculinity that was immediately beneficial to womankind. ‘Toxic’ masculinity was always characterized as Man Up or Shut Up masculinity:
Man Up or Shut Up – The Male Catch 22
One of the primary way’s Honor is used against men is in the feminized perpetuation of traditionally masculine expectations when it’s convenient, while simultaneously expecting egalitarian gender parity when it’s convenient.
For the past 60 years feminization has built in the perfect Catch 22 social convention for anything masculine; The expectation to assume the responsibilities of being a man (Man Up) while at the same time denigrating asserting masculinity as a positive (Shut Up). What ever aspect of maleness that serves the feminine purpose is a man’s masculine responsibility, yet any aspect that disagrees with feminine primacy is labeled Patriarchy and Misogyny.
Essentially, this convention keeps beta males in a perpetual state of chasing their own tails. Over the course of a lifetime they’re conditioned to believe that they’re cursed with masculinity (Patriarchy) yet are still responsible to ‘Man Up’ when it suits a feminine imperative. So it’s therefore unsurprising to see that half the men in western society believe women dominate the world (male powerlessness) while at the same time women complain of a lingering Patriarchy (female powerlessness) or at least sentiments of it. This is the Catch 22 writ large. The guy who does in fact Man Up is a chauvinist, misogynist, patriarch, but he still needs to man up when it’s convenient to meet the needs of a female imperative.
Now, in the Feminine Imperative’s unceasing efforts to Remove the Man a distinction between a useful masculinity and a dangerous masculinity is no longer something that resonates. All masculinity, all aspects, beneficial or detrimental, are to be considered the problem:
That the problem might just be masculinity, plain and simple, is not something we’re eager to countenance. While we might be prepared to apply a little structural analysis to the situation – yes, there is something about men and the way they are conditioned that leads us to this place – we’re unwilling to draw any final conclusions. Masculinity doesn’t kill people; it’s those mysterious toxins that are to blame.
[…]But strip away the so-called toxic aspects of masculinity: the aggression, the violence, the hate, the guns, and what are you left with? Strength, endurance, a woody-scented perfume, a liking for the colour blue? Certainly nothing that need be associated with manhood or maleness. These are simply individual qualities. The only reason to code them as “masculine” is to preserve a social hierarchy that ought to be destroyed.
[…]What would be so terrible about a world in which boys were treated no differently to girls from the day they were born? In which there are no pink/blue codifications to hide behind? In which a man’s anger and aggression were considered every bit as aberrant and unnatural as a woman’s?
The problem we’re facing isn’t toxic masculinity; it’s that masculinity is toxic. It’s time we questioned even its most subtle manifestations.
Going forward this will be the narrative. There will be no distinction between misogyny, masculinity and maleness. What this author, perhaps deliberately, doesn’t want to address is that masculinity and all the associated ways our thinking and our behaviors that manifest from the biological side of our nature aren’t something that can be dissociated from us without killing us or erasing what we were evolved to be. There are no truly positive or negative aspects of masculinity, just as there are no positive or negative aspects of Hypergamy. They just are, and what makes them beneficial or detrimental all depends on the context in which they are applied. That may seem strange coming from the author of a book titled Positive Masculinity but understand that what is positive about masculinity is made so by need and by circumstance.
In a world created in the image of the Feminine Imperative masculinity itself is a horrible evil, until it’s needed to save women from rising floodwaters.
You see, for as much as the imperative would like to remove the ‘man’ from our language, our cultural consciousness, that man will always be needed in spite of the hate directed towards masculinity. This is what a feminine-primary society would have us redefine as some other term, something not unique to a male human being. But conventional, evolved, masculine strength and purpose will always manifest in men who unapologetically embrace it without an afterthought.
In my interview with Craig James we discussed men’s higher order thinking and purpose as well as our vital animal nature. You don’t separate one from the other. This is what the Feminine Imperative would have from men; a unilaterally female controlled utility-based masculinity that saves them from the worst consequences of both their environments and their decisions and simultaneously disappears when inconvenient. We hear women bleating about a lack of Real Men and the disappearance of true grit, and in the next article linked we see efforts to erase men entirely from social influence.
As I told Craig, when I’m in the squat rack I’m glad I have a feral, animal nature. It’s a survival aspect of human evolution. I’m not suggesting with this essay that men will become extinct; on the contrary I think what will help define our new conventional masculinity will largely be determined by how we express it in spite of a world arrayed against Man-kind. An equalist culture based on blank-slate equalism doesn’t see that you don’t separate the animal side of the human being from the high-order side. It is unwilling to accept that we need both; that we benefit and sometimes suffer from both.